a new normal

[may22]

Thanks Pommy and Cardinal! Baking... I've been holding off because of all the stuffing of my face I did the first few weeks of this and I'm just not sure I can handle the temptation of bread and brownies and whatever else in the house. But, I was thinking of making pasta and my younger daughter really wants to make brownies, so... I"m sure I'll end up there soon. H made chocolate chip cookie bars with her last week and we snarfed them all down in a few days.

Patience... has always been my weakness. I am not a patient person, generally... so this is both good for me to practice patience and giving up control and letting things BE-- all things I am terrible at-- but is also so, so hard. I will say it is easier for me to slide back into the patience/just BEING mindset now than it was previously, thanks to DBing.

I think I've been better these last couple of weeks at setting aside the A feelings than I had been, but they're still there.. I'm just better at feeling them and letting them go before I take it out on H. I've been thinking less about AP and scenes of H with her (which are awful of course) and more about hurtful things that H said to me during the course of the A.

For instance, when he was in the A, my H kept saying that I had this outdated idea of M, that just because we made these promises to each other all those years ago shouldn't mean we're stuck forever, blah blah blah. I keep thinking back to that. I definitely agree that love is a choice, one you have to make every day, and of course you shouldn't be stuck in a bad or abusive marriage just because your young dumb self said I do. But. At the same time I did mean those things I said when we got married and I thought he meant them too. Looking at him today, listening to him, being with him-- I just have the hardest time reconciling the H that I thought he was, and the H he is acting like today, with the person who lied and cheated and broke that promise we made to each other. He was selfish, weak, immature. Was he always that way? Was it some combination of character weakness with the MLC-like situation that he couldn't handle?

I feel like he was hurting and depressed (and I know I do bear some responsibility for the issues we had, SSM etc) but he took the easy way out and came up with all these justifications for why he acted the way he did. I feel like when I was in the depths of the A or limbo or whatever, I felt like I could handle anything as long as he didn't drag the children into this by leaving. As long as he was just hurting me, I could handle it. NBD. Now that that particular crisis is over, I'm finding myself drawn back to the hurtful things he said during the A and having a harder and harder time dealing with them. I think I packed them all away in order to deal with the day-to-day insanity, and now I get to deal with them.

Maybe I won't be able to forgive him. Then what? I definitely know I can't if we don't ever talk about it or deal with the A. I know that I just need to focus on myself, what I can control, and when/if he's ready to accept the enormity of what he did and talk about it, we can start working on it. We'll get there when we get there, or we won't. And if we never do, then I have more decisions to make. I know he's on a different timeline than I am. Right now, all he can do is be present, be a good dad and partner. He simply can't yet deal with the rest of it.

One thing that was incredibly frustrating during the A is that he made up this ridiculous narrative and honed it with his IC that I dictated our entire lives together, that when we first met he was young and dumb and ate microwave meals. So basically everything in our lives, the fact that we cook real food and drink wine and eat out at restaurants was all dictated and controlled by me. This was infuriating and made me crazy, because it is patently untrue, and in fact all the biggest changes and decisions in our lives have been at least 50% if not more dictated by him-- moving across the country, house purchases, moving back, etc.

Anyway, he packed this particular narrative away but then the other day it came up again-- he was doing something in the kitchen, I tried to help (honestly, 100% to help, I didn't give a $hit how he actually did it but just got out the garbage for him) and he trotted it back out, I was trying to control how he cooked. We ended up talking about it later and I asked him to talk with his IC about it, that he needs to go back and examine this BS narrative he made up and challenge it, that in fact the very behaviors he complains about with me are actually behaviors he tends to display himself (he gets annoyed with how I load the dishwasher sometimes, for instance, because apparently there is a "right" way to do it in his mind and I'm not doing it that way).

To his credit, he listened, he didn't argue, he talked with her about it, said she'd given him some things to think about and work on, and I haven't heard it since. So that did give me a little hope, he is willing to listen and work on some of his own issues that make him a less-than-perfect H... maybe one day he will be ready to confront this huge thing he did that make him a really $hitty H. I think he just has such a hard time seeing himself as a person that would do such a terrible thing that he either wants to pretend it didn't happen or pretend it wasn't so bad and was justified. I wonder if this is something he can slowly start to deal with, or if one day all of a sudden it will hit him like a ton of bricks. Anyone know?

I don't consider what we're doing piecing, because I think we have to be both ready to deal with the A before we're there. I guess we are in reconciliation, since he ended the A (now almost 10 weeks ago) and has been explicit and unwavering that he is choosing the M ever since he made that decision (about 3 months ago). We are having more regular sex, mostly initiated by me, though he's an enthusiastic participant, and initiating is still a 180 that feels new for me, and something I'm doing for me, not for him or for any reaction from him. I don't know. I keep reading piecing threads about it being the hardest part. I believe it.